Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Fyodor Dostoevsky
are all dead.  Leaving the hospital I think of them,
walking from the darkened tile interior out into
the wall of sunlight, past the flower stall.

I need to see the Great Wall of China—
as if a doctor could be bargained with.
As he spoke, slowly, about the treatments
and what I should expect—how finally
they don't really know—how every body
and every case is different—I remembered
the photographs sent back from space proving
the continents do look like maps in the Atlas.
Turkey right now is the best place to find relics
of the ancient world.  The Great Wall of China
is visible from space—the snaking stone fortress.
It is a boundary.  I watched the gray trees
wave maroon-tipped branches back and forth
while the doctor spoke.

The strangest things—my wife, with a cookbook open
on the counter, stirs rice.  She turns around to ask me
to get her something and brushes her blonde bangs back
from her forehead, she wants me to take something to the table.
We are entertaining and our friends are laughing
at the table in the other room in the dim light.

I am laughing and following a story that I will soon
forget, some funny incident of travel, some Italian cab driver
and a tourist.  Candle light flashes the repetition
of silver leaves down the walls.  Five bottles of wine
on the porch, chilling in the drift snow and
we we will drink them all before the night ends.

My wife hands me a bottle of wine
and a crescent of snow drops to the kitchen floor
from the bottle bottom as I walk from the room.
She pours pistachios onto the rice, stirs
the white rice red!

II.

I am a boy struggling with questions.
Every night, sitting at a wood desk, smelling
the waxed wood, ink, the sweat of others
as we try to solve problems.
They are dreams of water, fog,
old cargo ships moaning
toward shrouded harbors.
The boats call from the distance
like bats navigating darkness.
I am supposed to figure out
what the boats contain, their destinations,
time and weather, the stories behind them.

The woman who was stirring rice
who will always be standing in the kitchen, asking me
to give her something, is no longer my wife.
We separated years ago.  She will surprise
all our friends and be my true widow.
In my dream, she and my son and I play poker.
It is very late, although we are not tired.
My son asks about the significance of different cards.
When you play poker not everybody can lose.
It starts to rain.
My wife says to me, death is like
going through a sieve—the body is
too coarse a form of energy to continue
the way it is.

The man next to me in the ward coughs up blood,
tosses all night, for days tells me amazing stories,
is kind.  There is a vast ceiling, weeping, curtains drawn,
whispers and wails of those that have loved.
Every reader is a dying man looking for distraction.
The man next to me knows me from somewhere else,
admits he is a doctor.
When they come to take me for the treatments—he is the one
who draws the bull's eye on my forehead with the black
marker for the radiation.

_________________________________________________________________________

KAREN FISH is the author of two books of poetry, (click title) The Cedar Canoe, published by the University of Georgia Press, and (click title) What is Beyond Us, published by Harper/Collins.  "The Nights of Knowing," is the title poem from a recently completed manuscript. "The Nights of Knowing" originally appeared in the American Poetry Review (September/October 1997).

If you missed Karen Fish's poem, "The Round-Up" in Slate Magazine, click here to read it.

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